


S/M/T/Th/F/S

by ASilvergirl



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Crack, Don't copy to another site, Dubious Science, Fluff and Crack, John Watson is a Bit Not Good, John is luminous, Missing Wednesday, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes Experiments on John Watson, Sherlock is luminous, very dubious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 05:35:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19457431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ASilvergirl/pseuds/ASilvergirl
Summary: People say John glows when he's around Sherlock. Sherlock experiments to prove it.





	S/M/T/Th/F/S

**Author's Note:**

> And now for something completely different. Crack. Total crack. My favorite Missing Wednesday fics I'd read were beautifully angsty. So, maybe it was time for...
> 
> With beta thanks to Anyawen, 7PercentSolution and J_Bailier, with a special nod to Anyawen for her awesome title.

It began on a Monday morning.

Sherlock had been awake for hours. Meaning two days. Maybe three. He still had no indication that this technique would work in a human subject. The eye fatigue had become too great to ignore; blinking away the grit had given him no relief. He forced himself to take his eyes off the slide he'd been examining through the eyepiece. 

He became aware of water running in the bathroom. Had he been so occupied he hadn't realised John was awake? When his perception was so blunted, the solution was obvious. He had to sleep. _Hateful._ As he walked down the corridor toward his bedroom, the sound of water became louder.

In his peripheral vision, he caught a glimpse of his flatmate. He frowned, took a step back. Blinked.

The door was ajar. John was standing before the mirror. Wearing only his pants.

Blink. Blink.

Red pants.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Well, Christmas was only three days away. Was that the inspiration behind the red pants? John had polluted Sherlock’s mind with his holiday decorating. Or was it something John wore regularly? It didn't bear thinking about.

John was so absorbed in his oral hygiene that Sherlock reckoned he hadn't realised that the bathroom door was half-open. For his own part, Sherlock, admittedly, was now engrossed in watching John's ablutions, the precise movement of his hand on the toothbrush, the foam created by the toothpaste, the...

John moved…

_Damn!_

…and saw Sherlock’s reflection in the mirror. John startled and his hand jerked from his mouth, the toothbrush leaving a frothy white glob of toothpaste on the tip of his nose. Sherlock thought it looked rather… _charming._

"Do you mind?" The good doctor kicked the door closed with his foot. 

A moment's thought was all it took — the aha! moment he'd been desperate for. Sherlock's grin was wicked as the idea coalesced. He knew precisely what the next step in the experiment had to be.

\----------

Sherlock was at his computer when John walked in the door, hours later, after a shift at the clinic. "Have you moved more than your fingers all day?"

Sherlock grunted.

"You're exactly where I left you this morning."

"Faulty logic, John, the sign of an undisciplined mind. Just because I am in relatively the same position as when you last saw me does not mean that I haven't moved during the course of the day."

"You haven't moved, have you?"

"Why would I?"

John passed behind him as he veered off toward the kitchen. Too late, Sherlock saw John glance at his computer screen.

"What are you researching now?" The tone was casual enough until, "Hold on. Did you hack into Elsevier?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I did not hack into Elsevier. It is possible to purchase a subscription. People do it all the time... But I simply used your password."

Sherlock watched as John rubbed his face, the exasperation clear, so Sherlock plastered a tentative smile on his face.

"You are, without a doubt, the most ..."

"Find an adjective you haven't used before, John. You know how I hate repetition," Sherlock said, but there was no edge to it. He allowed his smile to soften, and John chuckled. _Ha, works every time._

Sherlock sighed. "PubMed is next to useless unless I have access to the full texts." He accentuated the _x_. "Aren't you hungry or something?” he mumbled as he waved John away.

Sherlock re-thought his search parameters: intracellular uptake, photo-switchable organic nanoparticles, biomarkers, even florescence-based alternative splicing reporters. He was getting nowhere. Thankfully, he had Dr. Stapleton's notes from Baskerville. He'd photocopied them when he'd been alone in the lab. 

"You haven't heard a thing I said, have you? I was asking..." John signed what Sherlock considered his frankly endearing, frustrated sigh. Not that he'd ever tell John that. 

\------------------------

Wednesday morning.

Sherlock heard the bathroom door open.

A confused John shouted out, "Sherlock, what happened to my nose?"

"Don't you remember? You nicked yourself last night."

Almost true. After John had done a quick wash, brushed his teeth, and gone to bed, Sherlock had waited for the drug to take effect, applied some lidocaine, and made a small incision in John's nose. A good, surgical cut, clean, shallow. Sherlock had slipped in the implant and closed with a butterfly plaster.

"Why don't you remember? Have some coffee or something," he said to the doctor, who was scratching his head in confusion, his brow furrowed in thought. "Should be just about time to take off that plaster, don't you think?"

John removed the plaster then brushed his teeth and shaved. Sherlock smiled.

\-------

Later evening, it was time to determine if the experiment had worked. John had had the day off and was currently lounging in his chair, mystery book in his hands. Sherlock paced; it was a stormy evening with darkening skies, as if the heavens were conspiring with Sherlock. Finally, dark! He went through the living room and kitchen, turning off lights. John, engrossed in the book, grunted.

"Sherlock? I’m reading. Lights?"

"Headache," he grunted, and continued depriving the room of as much light as possible. The last bulb flicked off. Sherlock was almost quivering with anticipation. He took a breath, slowly turned around to face John, and let out what could only be described as a triumphant squeak.

John looked up, a flicker of alarm on his face. "You all right?"

"Fine, John," he said, his voice returning to its normal octave. He watched, mesmerised, as John's head then twisted from to one side then the other, ducking as if something had flown too close to his face.

Granted, it was a very faint light, but the tip of John's nose was glowing. Red.

Sherlock walked toward to him get a closer look. He circled him slowly. Under his breath, he began to sing. "Rudolph, with your nose so bright...”

" _You_ , singing Christmas carols?"

"Why not? You like Christmas. It positively makes you _glow_."

"But you don't like Christmas," he said, as his hands batted away invisible insects. 

"Seeing things, John?"

"No, well, it's just...there's this odd sensation."

"You aren't feeling _light_ headed, are you?"

"No, why would you think...?" He stopped cold, suspicion dawning. _"SHERLOCK!"_

Sherlock raised his hands in a placating gesture. "Now, John—"

"Tell me!" he ordered, as he snapped on a light.

"Nothing to be upset about. Just a little...little experiment. Really small. Minuscule, in the grand scheme of things."

John's eyebrows knitted together as his anger was barely contained. "Involving?"

"It barely qualifies as invasive."

"Invasive!"

"In hindsight, I can see how you might interpret that as slightly...inappropriate—"

"Inappropriate!"

"—but I was hoping you might actually find it humorous."

John's cheeks puffed out as he slowly exhaled.

"Did you poison me?"

"Of course not."

John's hands were clenched into fists and, _ooh_ , there was that dangerous semi-tilt of John's head; Sherlock took a step back.

"You drugged me. Again."

"Define... Not exactly. Well, yes, but..." Sherlock stammered.

"With--?"

"I didn't want it to hurt, John."

John looked up at him from beneath hooded eyes. "What did you use?"

"Just a teeny bit of lidocaine...and there might have been some midazolam involved."

John pinched the bridge of his nose, avoiding the sore area. "So I wouldn't remember you doing it. What exactly did you do to me?"

Sherlock fumbled around on his desk and somehow found a mirror. He switched off the light and held the mirror up to the good doctor's face.

John took a shocked breath in. "I will kill you."

The two men stood there in silence, as John could not take his eyes off the mirror and Sherlock could not take his eyes off John's nose.

“How?”

Sherlock heard the undercurrent of panic in John's voice.

“Injecting nanoparticles of the fluorescence manufactured at Baskerville. Shifted from the blue to the red end of the spectrum.”

“Oh, Christ. Is it toxic?”

Sherlock looked hurt.

“I wouldn’t do that to you, John. It should fade….with time.”

“How long?”

Sherlock shrugged. “No idea. But it’s shed through the kidneys. So just keep drinking water.”

John looked back in the mirror. Unbelievably and despite himself, the smallest smile quirked the side of John's mouth. It soon became a grin, then a giggle, high-pitched and contagious, and Sherlock was laughing with him, the hardest they'd laughed since the insanity at the Palace.

"In fairness," Sherlock gasped once he has his breath back, "it's just your nose that's glowing. Not like the all-over glow of poor Bluebell."

"Thank God for small mercies."

"Doctor, there was no deity involved."*

Four hours and six glasses of water later, it had run its course.

John had changed into in his pajamas in the bathroom. Now, Sherlock watched as John put a new plaster on his nose and finished brushing his teeth.

"This is a Wednesday I won't be forgetting anytime soon."

"Oh, I think you will," Sherlock muttered under his breath.

"You never did tell me how you administered the midazolam."

"In your toothpaste."

**Author's Note:**

> *That’s a tip of the hat to Star Trek. I stole the line, slightly modified, from the episode “Obsession”.


End file.
